Is anyone else around here investing in Magic cards?

My plan is to buy sealed boxes, keep them for x amount of time and then sell them for more.

I don't really know much about MTG, there's a shop near me that sells them and hosts tournaments. I play board games there.

Going to start buying like 1-5 boxes of each set, storing them sealed and safely, then after 5-10 years see if I can sell them for more.

I've done a bit of research, a lot of boxes go up in value, a few go down.

The store near me is now selling some older boxes for as much as €200/300 while the original price is around €115

I think trading individual cards would be more profitable, but I'm not very interested in learning a ton about the cards or investing a lot of my time into this.
I actually know a guy who makes a ton doing this.

Would appreciate any tips / advice!

I'm doing the same (buy and holding sealed) but it's less than 1% of my net worth and is mostly a for fun thing. If you want to hold 6 or 7 figures worth of MTG boxes, physical storage space and security start to become a concern. Liquidity is a bit of a pain since you'll probably be going to ebay to sell.
New sets have an allocation period, where X months after the set is released they continued to be printed "to demand", so the price won't even start appreciating until the allocation is over. (Some specialty sets, like time spiral remastered, and some products, like MH2 Collector are not printed "to demand" for months).
Also I would consider pokemon sealed.
I think there would no reason to sell at 5 or 10 years unless you need the money. Even homelands, one of the shittiest sets ever (from 1995) is now selling for $700/box.

I'm a magic player and have bought/sold for a ~15 years, but have never gotten into sealed product.

If you can buy product that then goes out of print and sell it in the short term then do that. Again, I haven't sold sealed product and have done zero research, but from other situations my assumption would be the following:

- Set goes out of print.
- Demand increases sometime after the set is no longer in print and price jumps by a large % very quickly.
- Price falls.
- Price slowly rises over a much longer time frame.

All that said, if you aren't interested in magic I don't see why you would buy/sell magic. You may be able to make money buying/selling every set they print, but you certainly aren't going to make as much as someone who plays the game and holds sealed product more selectively.

Demand is way higher now. Which means supply of current sets will be higher in the future and demand may or may not grow.

Definitely not planning on holding 6+ figures of magic boxes in worth
Sticking with 4, maybe low 5 figures for a few years probably.

If I can buy for €112.5 (just bought my first 2 boxes at this price)
Ravnica Allegiance and War of the Spark (both from early 2019)
And then sell them a few months (or a year or two) later for €150 that would be great.

Good to know they keep rising in value over longer periods of time too.

For now I just want to keep a few boxes and if I can sell them at like a 10-20% profit or more I'd do that.
Might get more serious about it in the future.

Not planning to sell them online, but in the store where the players are, who I will socialize with weekly.

I saw this exact playbook laid out in a topshot discord for physical sports cards

Not saying its not a profitable move, just that this isn't a unique idea and I think a lot of people are going to get their faces ripped off buying into the biggest collectors hype market right when the main catalyst for said hype market is dying off

What do you mean the main catalyst for the market is dying off?
MTG has been popular for decades.

Card collections have seen significant rise in interest and price since covid started

The market will deflate presumably and it isn't going to be dual lands, early foils, etc that get hit the hardest.

Its going to be product printed during the biggest hype period that's ever existed.

Alpha Investments on YouTube and the MTGFinance subreddit are the places to go for this kind of info. I feel like this area is oversaturated at the moment. If you are willing to hold sealed product for a few years, you will surely make a profit, but I don't think you are beating the S&P 500 with the exception of some very specific boxes, namely the ones with chase cards and lottery cards.

Are MTG cards really worth that much outside of a few incredibly rare ones? I have thousands I've been meaning to get rid of.

Yes. Old MTG cards and sealed product can be worth a lot more than you'd think.

Yeah you're right. My Preacher deck looks like it might be worth a bit. Is there an easy way to go through cards and guess their value? As a general rule if it has a white border are they worthless?

The key question you have to ask yourself is: 'Why are these people selling their sealed boxes to me if it's so obvious they'll appreciate in value'. What information edge do I have here?

Assuming people holding MtG sealed boxes generally know what they're doing and the value of what they hold, it isn't a given you're the winner in this trade. Especially since it looks like you have no deep knowledge of the game but are mostly making a play on scarcity in a world where few things are scarce. This is all fine but just realize the type of gamble you're making.

If you buy a sealed box for $1K now, and can sell it for $2K in 7years, you've roughly made a ~10% yearly return. Is this even that great right now with unprecedented base money growth?

Edit: Don't forget to take into account fees/time investment/illiquidity discount etc.

outpost.be has a webshop with prices for a lot of single cards
might be helpful as a guideline
I'm sure there are better sites out there

Awesome, thanks a lot. Sorry for the derail everyone! Should really get a mod in here.

np, lol

I guess there are white border (common?) cards that can be valuable, especially from older sets?

Here is a very general rule:

Cards from Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited, even commons, can be worth decent money. If you have cards from these sets in good condition, look up the value. Even basic lands from Alpha are worth money.

The only cards that can be expected to retain any value are on the Reserved List. Twenty-something years ago, there was fan outcry when Wizards of the Coast reprinted some cards in newer sets, as the collectors were worried that their cards would go down in value. In response, the company created the Reserved List, which is a long list of cards that Wizards promised to not reprint. The company has promised to not reprint Black Lotus, for example, so you it is safe to say that the price of the card will not tank because of new supply. No new cards are ever put on the Reserved List, so you cannot bet on any new cards to retain their value, as any in-demand cards can just be reprinted by Wizards whenever they want.

Sealed product from a few years ago are worth money, but as has been pointed out in this thread, the cat's out of the bag these days. Twenty years ago, people were not buying sealed boxes as investments. Therefore there is low supply in an extremely high-demand hobby. These days there are a lot of people that are "investing" in Magic cards. While there may be 100 sealed Alpha boxes in the world at the moment (which would be a very generous estimate), there are tens of thousands of sealed boxes of Throne of Eldraine.

There is no doubt that a sealed box of Throne of Eldraine will be more valuable five years from now than it is now, but with fees, risks of scams, storage, etc., I would be surprised if it just beat the S&P 500.

Before investing, I highly suggest you watch some videos on the Alpha Investments Youtube channel. This is a good place to start https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...z5WcJ6x1wfcoL2

If you don't play Magic, I don't really suggest that you get into investing in it. The fun of investing in Magic cards are that you like the game, so you make money doing something you like. If you don't know anything about the history of the game, you are setting yourself up to make bad investments.

TCG Player Is the standard that buyers and sellers use when determining prices. Specifically "TCG Low", which is to say, the lowest price for a card at the corresponding condition.

I've played MTG in the past, I know the rules, I'm a poker player I love cards.

I'm a regular at the local store where they play MTG and hosts big tournaments, I know a lot of the people who play there.

I'm going to invest like 5k maybe 10k over 5-10 years into this. Not a huge amount.
Will be selling in the local store, so very little risk.

I currently don't play the game anymore and I'm not planning on starting again either.
So I don't know the current cards nor the values of any of the past cards / boxes / ...
But I'll learn what I need to know quickly with some experience.


Even if the market is over-saturated now (which I doubt) a lot of the boxes are just going to end up lost and/or forgotten within 5 years.

Is the market going to be less profitable than if I started 20 years ago, very likely.
Are the standard boxes from today going to be worth a ton in 20 years, who knows?


Thanks for the input though! Learned a lot of interesting things.

Not sure why you would doubt statistics.

Anyways, my brother and I often talk about how unlucky we were. We both got into magic right after all the sets worth big money and have a ton of Ice Age and Fallen Empires cards, the two most worthless sets in all of magic. I still have a cards worth some money though. Random Dark and Antiquities cards that I bought out of a big box of loosies 20+ years ago.

Which statistics? Haven't seen any.

The site I'm using lists:
Ice Age: $2650 avg and $1007 market
Fallen Empires: $1120 avg and $975 market

Assuming you bought them at $115 retail, that's quite a bit of a difference.


The local store I go to is selling Fallen Empires Boosters for €30 / pack
The current ones go for €4 / pack

Ice Age sealed is worth some money. Loose cards, which is what coordi is talking about here, are not worth much.

I would stay away from buying and holding sealed product unless you find a slam dunk deal. Buying sealed @ retail and holding doesn't seem like the best idea. A few friends of mine buy/ sell collections/singles and do pretty well. One thing that shocks me is how little a lot of people are willing to settle for which is basically 60%ish of the tcg mid/low obvious value of a collection. But the biggest amount of profit for them comes from value in the collection that the sellers don't see in a lot of the commons/uncommons and <100$ cards that have been exploding lately. Another big source of their profit is having special tcg accounts that limits the fee structure. A big thing you have to worry about is fakes but if you know the handful of proper tests and have a jewelers loop and know what to look for you should be fine. Biggest problem they're having is liquidity to buy more inventory and keep up w/ their TCG direct setup.They don't really play the game that much and its honestly not that important. They don't do a lot of speculating just a lot of simple math and cutting down their fee's as much as possible. You don't really have to know much about the game or even how to play the game, just how to check for fakes and some basic analysis. They both do this on the side of their regular jobs but the most time consuming part according to them I think is from sorting through volume.

I'm just gonna hijack this thread.

I've gone through all of my cards and separated them out into commons and everything else. Is anyone going to buy commons? I've got 3 large boxes of them which I think is around 6000 cards.

What is with the disparity of prices? https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/31...G5ERUFMd193Y0I. I have this, but I have no idea what to ask for. There is definitely some white around the edges from use, but I'd say it's somewhere between lightly and moderately played. It's listed as 850, and on sale for 1200

Finally how can I tell the difference between Alpha and Beta cards?

Thanks in advance

It's hard for people that don't handle magic cards regularly to grade the condition. For pricing look at the cheaper of tcg and cardkingdom and ebay and expect a discount off that since you're not providing their warranties. Offer better deals for big groups of commons etc. to save you time. If you want me to take a look at a few group photos of cards and explain the alpha/beta stuff I can see if there's anything I like.

TCG even has a "last sold" function at every condition level.

For example, your guardian beast's last solds are:

5/19/21
Heavily Played
$699.98

4/23/21
Moderately Played
$750.00

4/12/21
Lightly Played
$849.99

Collectibles are cooling off a bit along with crypto/everything.